


Warm

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (I'll explain in the notes :D), Descriptions of Rot, Fluff and Angst, Gamzee Can't Die, Humanstuck, M/M, Swearing, Zombies, but it's, inspired by some books, this was originally intended to be for Gamzee Week: AU Day but I'm so late oops, vague references to canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24523744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Gamzee Makara wasn’t sure what to say at most of these Dealing with Undeath Support Group meetings, but it seemed to make his boyfriend feel better knowing that he went.
Relationships: Folykl Darane/Kuprum Maxlol, Gamzee Makara/Karkat Vantas, Tagora Gorjek/Galekh Xigisi, mentioned
Comments: 6
Kudos: 37





	Warm

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! :) I hope you enjoy this, if you read it. I’ve really wanted to write about undead/ghostly Gamzee lately lol. This was inspired by the undead support groups in both “Breathers” by S. G. Browne and “The Reformed Vampire Support Group” by Catherine Jinks. I’ve wanted to write something like it for a while!!!
> 
> I hope you’re staying safe. Wishing you well.
> 
> PS -- The absolutely AMAZING artist Ceabu drew a picture for this story, along with some of my other fics!!! <3 <3 <3 I'm wondering if I shoulda linked it right away (what's the protocol, here, anyway???) but https://ceabu.tumblr.com/post/622664873516711936/u-ever-love-a-fic-writers-thatsrightdollface <\-- Her art is so fun and expressive, right?!

Gamzee Makara wasn’t sure what to say at most of these fucking Dealing with Undeath Support Group meetings, but it seemed to make his boyfriend feel better knowing that he went. Karkat had brought the flier home all hopeful and shit, and Gamzee’d been like, well, okay. What could it hurt? Karkat drove him every week, and waited for him in the lobby, slumped over in his chair, reading on his phone. Tossing anybody he caught looking at him super-challenging looks. He held Gamzee’s coat folded up on his lap in the winter, or hugged protectively to his chest. Like a talisman. Like the devotional pendants with stainless steel portraits of angels on them Gamzee wore tucked under his shirt, even now.

Can you believe once upon a time Gamzee’d thought things would be simple after he died? He’d go to heaven, or no. He’d have a funeral, and be buried in the Makara family crypt unless Karkat really wanted his ashes or some shit. They’d be old men, by then, Gamzee’d thought. Maybe they’d be married, even, and he might be “Gamzee Vantas” in the obituary instead. Beloved partner, and friend, and whatever the fuck else he managed to be. Hopefully. Haha. Hopefully, isn’t that fucking right?

Gamzee couldn’t get cold anymore, mind you: he’d told Karkat all that shit, in a teasing, shaky drawl. But Karkat liked knowing he’d wear a coat, anyway. It had a clown-themed horrorcore rap logo on the back and was tattered a little around the wrists; it meant Karkat didn’t have to watch his boyfriend’s skin frost over, already greyish and drooping but crusted with snow, too. Gamzee got it. He wore the coat, and he bent over to brush sloppy lips against Karkat’s forehead before he went in for another support group session. Karkat wouldn’t mind the heavy incense smells Gamzee used to mask his own slow rot, nowadays — their apartment was seeped in that shit, a motherfucking miasma hanging heavy all the time. Karkat would squeeze his arm, wordlessly. Reaching for him, but not quite knowing what to say, either. 

That was alright. Gamzee didn’t expect Karkat to say a blessed motherfucking thing, just like he wasn’t sure if he could expect heaven or anything like that, down the line. He’d been too shy to really bring up marriage to Karkat, after he stumbled back into his life with legs that jerked in rigor mortis spasms, sometimes, and soggy holes left by recently-removed maggots in his chest... so who knew if he could expect _that_ someday, either? Got harder, knowing he wouldn’t age right. Knowing he might not be able to die.

After this, they’d go home and watch TV until Karkat had to go to bed... or they’d get milkshakes at Sonic, even though Gamzee didn’t technically need to eat anymore... or Gamzee would insist they drive to their old friend Sollux’s house, so Karkat could blow off a little steam playing video games surrounded by flickering electronic light and whirring machinery, too loud for anybody to think. After this, Karkat would have plenty to say about every little thing. But here, in the pale yellow lamps of the rec center after-hours — because some of the undead couldn’t shamble around until it was good and dark — Karkat just held on. 

“I’ll be here,” Karkat murmured. And, “I know it,” Gamzee said back. He tried to smile so it reached his gummy-dark, long-dead eyes. Not easy to do, anymore, but Gamzee could try. Karkat smiled back, though. Either way.

It had been hard on Karkat, when he’d learned Gamzee was most-likely dead, couple years back, now. Gamzee’d taken a job with some guy called Caliborn, and then... you know. Gone missing. What the fuck had that job even been? Setting up computer tables? Hauling in boxes? It was only supposed to be a day or so’s work, and then some cash to help with the fucking rent; it was supposed to be quick and done. Karkat had scolded him for leaving a soggy marshmallow cereal bowl in the bed, and he’d gone to work. Should’ve been home before nine-thirty, latest, only... no, motherfucker. No. The details had gone mercifully blurry, now: Gamzee wasn’t lying when he said he couldn’t exactly remember all that shit. What happened next. How he’d ended up where they found him, later.

Karkat had cussed out the poor hospital lady who’d called to tell him about it. A cruel, inhuman fucking joke, telling him his boyfriend had been found, finally, but folded up into a refrigerator, still conscious with a bullet in his brain. Gamzee would need special care, to walk again; Gamzee would need someone to pluck the worms out of his skin; Gamzee would need help, like so many of the zombies and vampires and ghouls you saw on the news. Karkat had told that lady not to fuck with him. He still got all red faced and fuming, thinking too hard about the reports he’d demanded to read. The forms he’d signed. Gamzee’s refrigerator’d had chains wound all around it, locked up motherfucking tight. It had been dropped in the middle of a forest, way far out of town. Drifted down off a cliff in a mudslide, from the looks of it. Gamzee’d been wearing three pairs of handcuffs and no shoes.

He had died, but then not stayed dead. How the fuck had it happened? Divine intervention? A smear of strange chemicals, some science-y shit? Could’ve been. Sometimes was, for the undead. Electricity could do it one way, and an ancient, starving blood disease another prettier-but-murdery fucking way. Gamzee couldn’t remember what’d gone weird, for him. He’d still had those angel pendants tangled around his neck; he remembered a darkness so deep it had been full of colors and mayhem after a while. He’d dreamed, even though the undead couldn’t sleep, exactly. He’d dreamed about a planet full of rambling circus tents and screaming laughter. He’d dreamed half his soul was trapped in this... this motherfucking puppet thing, with round blue staring plastic eyes... and maybe that was why he couldn’t die. Maybe.

Or maybe not. There sure wasn’t any puppet thing in the fridge with him, though. They’d dragged Gamzee out of the refrigerator, half-buried in gloppy seething mud. And now he was here. Karkat had brought him flowers in the hospital, and reclaimed him easy as anything. Yeah, that’s my walking corpse, right there. Feel free to sue me if he eats your fucking brain.

Gamzee’d never had anybody bring him flowers before. He knew plenty of people who woke up undead never got anything like flowers at all — times were changing. Maybe a century back, Karkat would have had to hide him out all secret in a cellar or something. Gamzee would’ve known the world by muffled candlelight, and there sure as fuck wouldn’t be any support groups meeting weekly in the neighborhood rec center. 

Gamzee knew Karkat didn’t like thinking about it, but it was the sort of thing people talked about in the sharing circle a lot. What times had been like when they first died so long ago. Friends they lost, or lovers who tried to kill them again, so this time it’d stick; exorcisms that left them messily changed. Gamzee didn’t talk too much, in the sharing circle. He made jokes, every now and then. Remembered people’s stories as well as he could, and what comics they’d wanted to borrow from him. There was Galekh the business-casual vampire, whose boyfriend Tagora waited for him in the lobby with Karkat, not meeting each other’s eyes... there was Aradia, a hollow, staring ghost woman who painted ancient sigils during art-therapy sessions... there was Folykl, whose husband had brought her back to life every morning for decades, lending her some of his own heartbeats as long as he could. And more. And more, of course, from week to week to week.

They were all pretty familiar, by now. Gamzee liked them. They’d sit around in a circle in a squeaky gymnasium with rubber dodgeballs looking like detached clown noses waiting in one of those big ass rolling carts nearby, and they’d drink red liquid out of cheerful paper cups — discreetly poured blood, for some of them, and fruit punch for Gamzee and Aradia. They’d talk, or paint, or listen to Galekh read from some ancient book of his he’d managed to buy back from an estate sale online. And then it would be over. Gamzee still wouldn’t know why heaven didn’t want any of them, but he _would_ know more about what it had been like trying to smuggle a motherfucker’s own severed head out of the morgue way, way long ago.

Galekh looked like a carved statue, skin impossibly perfect and uncannily, bloodlessly still. And a person could see straight through Aradia’s head, like she was formed out of gauzy tissue paper, caught in a wind and never, never landing. Sometimes Gamzee wanted to ask them if they thought Karkat would ever marry him, now... if it would be fair of him to ask, given what all kinda nonsense he’d found himself in. Sometimes Gamzee wanted to ask whether they thought part of his soul might actually be sealed away somewhere else, and how the fuck a thing like that happened, and whether he should be truly, horrifically, cosmically afraid. But the words still hadn’t come together, you know? He sat mostly silent, and drank too much fruit punch — they made extra for him, he’d learned — and when somebody new asked if he was the zombie some hikers’d found squished in a fridge in the woods he said, “Haha, yeah, man. That’s me.”

When strangers around their apartment complex asked if Gamzee was the zombie from the fridge, from the woods, _from the news_ , Karkat usually bristled at them. Standing up a little straighter. Setting himself between Gamzee and whoever wanted to know if he was already dead. (As if they couldn’t fucking tell.) It was just like how Karkat had hidden most of the mirrors, before bringing his boyfriend back home; just like the way Karkat wanted him to wear a coat in the snow. It was sweet. Maybe Gamzee tried to say it wasn’t exactly necessary, at first, before he realized what it meant to Karkat... but hey. He’d been claimed, after all. Maybe someday, Gamzee would work up the nerve to tell Karkat what that meant to him. It had been easier, when he was alive. If he got high, he could pour his heart out into his hands... he could ramble on about anything to Karkat, and fall asleep with his face squished into his boyfriend’s leg on the couch. He hadn’t felt the need to keep any secrets.

Things hadn’t changed, you know. Not really. “You’re my favorite fucking person in the world,” Gamzee had drawled, back in the day. He still meant that. “You’re amazing and I’m so lucky you’re playing with my hair right now — goddamn what did I do to get so lucky?“ Gamzee still meant that, too. “I’d die for you, you know. If I had to. I’d fucking die for you, man.” Gamzee... _would_ have meant that. If he thought it mattered. Karkat had smoothed his tangled curls down a little bit and rolled his eyes, way back when. Karkat had wiped pot brownie crumbs off his cheek and told him to pay attention to the movie.

Now, Karkat watched Gamzee hesitate, starting off down the rec center hall. Heading to the gym. Now, Karkat said, “Go on! They’re all gonna have to wait for you,” and Gamzee snickered, a little. “I’m going,” he said. It was kinda nice, when Karkat snapped at him some. Meant he still saw him as the same guy, in the end. Gamzee shuffled off towards the Dealing with Undeath Support Group meeting, and behind him he heard Karkat tell Tagora — yeah, Galekh the vampire’s boyfriend Tagora — to shut the goddamn door because he was letting all the cold in. Tagora had to take phone calls all the time... something to do with his law firm, or whatever the fuck?... and that meant he was in and out, in and out, pacing the parking lot under a sky full of cold bright stars.

“You’re right, he does seem to be walking a little easier,” Tagora remarked, and Karkat said, “Shut up, dumbass.” They were watching Gamzee walk away together, now, huh? Shit. That was new. Gamzee made a point not to glance behind him, then... not to let on he’d heard any of that... but if he’d had a heartbeat, he was pretty damn sure it would’ve skipped a little, there. Karkat sounded proud of him, didn’t he? Whatever he was, now, and however he’d managed to come home. Whatever he said or didn’t say during sharing circles, and however much he’d cost the rec center in fruit punch.

It sounded like Karkat had been bragging to Tagora about him, and that felt... how did that feel? Warm, almost. When all of this was over, Karkat would be waiting with Gamzee’s coat, and that would feel sort of warm, too, even if he couldn’t get cold anymore. If that made any fucking sense. Karkat would fold an arm around him, leading him into the parking lot. Maybe Karkat and Tagora would nod to each other, begrudgingly. Knowingly. Maybe neither of them would be here if they weren’t absolutely sure what they wanted, even if Galekh _did_ get sort of dreamy-eyed talking about what it would be like if he could surprise Tagora at work with fancy coffees in the middle of the day. Even if Gamzee hadn’t busted out one of his old goat of a dad’s antique rings just yet — but he thought about it, and if Karkat guessed any of that shit he still hadn’t run away. It was sort of miraculous if a motherfucker looked at it that way, wasn’t it? 

Yeah, man. Yeah, it was.

Can you believe once upon a time Gamzee’d thought things would be simple after he died? 


End file.
